Biography

After graduating from the Department of Chemistry of Qufu Teachers College in 1965,[2] she was admitted to the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry to study under Chen-Lu Tsou, in the last class of graduate students accepted before the Cultural Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution began a year later, she was sent to work on a farm in Tianjin for a year and half. In 1975, she transferred to her alma mater Qufu Teachers College in Shandong as a chemistry lecturer, in order to be reunited with her husband.[1]

When scientific research resumed after the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1978 she was admitted for the second time to the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and became the first graduate student of the renowned scientist Wang Yinglai after the Cultural Revolution.[1] She was awarded a Fogarty Fellowship by the US National Institutes of Health to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of California, Davis from 1984 to 1987.[2]

After she returned to Shanghai in 1987, Wang Yinglai chose her to succeed him as principal investigator of the institute's research on the interaction between enzymes and nucleic acids.[1] However, she was soon diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery.[1] She resumed her work four months after surgery.[1]

Wang has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals. Her studies of the interaction between transfer RNAs (tRNA) and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS) are widely cited.[1][2] She has advised more than 30 graduate students or postdoctoral researchers.[2]

Honours and recognition

Wang was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005,[2][3][2] and a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences in 2006, for advancing "understanding about the accuracy of protein biosynthesis based on interaction between aaRSs and tRNAs, the co-revolution of aaRSs/tRNA, and the mechanism of disease-associated mutations of tRNAs in mitochondria."[4]